Innehållsförteckning för May 2021 från MOJO

Lucy O’Brien Lucy was a teenage punk when she saw Kate Bush’s Tour Of Life in 1979, and was so inspired that she co-founded a girl band. She writes about Kate on page 67, and also in her book She Bop: The Definitive History Of Women In Popular Music, which has recently been re-published in a 25th anniversary edition. Mike McCartney Brother of that Paul, Mike scored ’60s hits of his own as a third of Scaffold. This month, from page 30, he contributes photographs and memories from the dawn of The Beatles. They’re drawn from Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool, a lavish new Genesis Books tome. Copies can be purchased from: www.mikemccartneybook.com Alison Fensterstock Alison has written about music, books and eccentrics for NPR Music, Rolling Stone, the New York…

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk JUST OVER A MINUTE INTO THE precision frenzy of Sat In Your Lap, there’s a clue as to what it might be like inside Kate Bush’s head. “I’ve been doing this for years,” she observes, though at this point she has been a recording artist for less than four. “My goal is moving near/It says, Look, I’m over here/Then it up and disappears.” How to capture that elusive sound? Clearly, the process can be long and exasperating. Since Sat In Your Lap came out as a single, 40 years ago this summer, Bush has released six albums of new songs: three more in the 1980s, then one per decade subsequently. The perfectionism, the innovation, the belief that pop music can be transformative and somehow magical, the strategic…

The Troggs The Troggs Tapes (DJM, 1981) The zenith of bands-arguing audio-voyeurism: Reg Presley and the boys bicker and swear in the studio in 1970, secretly taped by producer Clive Franks. For more in-band straight-talk go to Iron Maiden’s Mission From ‘Arry and The Byrds’ Dolphin’s Smile outtake. Buddy Rich The Bus Tapes (BOOTLEG, EARLY ’80s) Long-suffering musicians in the jazz drummer’s big band get chewed out and called “bullshit jive artists” and “assholes”. Apparently Buddy knew he was being recorded and his band loved him anyway. There’s also a similar Paul Anka version. Various 100% Genuine (‘NO LABEL’, 1998) Allegedly released via Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, 40 unwitting “lonely hearts” on an old-fashioned telephone “dating service” seek new “romantic” “encounters”. Sometimes warped, sometimes just sad, no one would admit…

1 T.Rex Get It On (FROM ELECTRIC WARRIOR, FLY, 1971) 2 David Bowie Five Years (FROM THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS, RCA, 1972) 3 Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK (FROM NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS… HERE’S THE SEX PISTOLS, VIRGIN, 1977) 4 Television Personalities Part-Time Punks (FROM WHERE’S BILL GRUNDY NOW?, KINGS ROAD, 1978) 5 Happy Mondays Tart Tart (FROM SQUIRREL AND G-MAN TWENTY FOUR HOUR PARTY PEOPLE PLASTIC FACE CARNT SMILE (WHITE OUT), FACTORY, 1987)…

A FAMILY WITH ROOTS IN VAUDEVILLE that bounced from Chicago to Arizona to Washington state and back. A wild ’60s adolescence thumbing her way up and down California, chasing rock festivals and rebellion. A youth spent riding shotgun around seedy ’70s Los Angeles with Dr. John, Lowell George and Tom Waits, plus years living in New Orleans, New York City, Paris and on tour all over the world. Rickie Lee Jones’s life has been one of such constant motion that it makes sense her new memoir, Last Chance Texaco, is divided into sections that evoke the road: The Back Seat for her childhood; Driver’s Seat for her fast ride to stardom with her self-titled 1979 debut album and 1981’s Pirates follow-up, coining her snappy, slinky jazz-pop persona ‘The Duchess of…

DR MARTIN LUTHER KING …Free At Last (1968) A recording of Dr King’s April 3, 1968 address in Memphis, climaxed by the “I have been to the mountain top” passage. Assassinated the following day, Motown’s memorial album included the I Have A Dream speech (Washington, 1963). Time the Sound Of Young America grew up. THE TEMPTATIONS Puzzle People (1969) Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s songs of the late ’60s were more Sly funk than Gaye silk but black consciousness was key. Often overlooked between Cloud Nine (’69) and Psychedelic Shack (’70), PP’s Don’t Let The Joneses Get You Down, Slave and Message From A Black Man have real bite. EDWIN STARR Involved (1971) Another Whitfield/Strong project, Edwin Starr’s brusque, bold voice excelled on 1970 protest 45s War and Stop The…

OF COURSE, it nearly never happened at all. After lighting designer Bill Duffield died in an accident de-rigging the warm-up gig in Poole, Kate Bush was close to cancelling her first, full-blown tour. But she soldiered on and the show became a vivid celebration of life. On April 7, 1979, that show reached Southampton Gaumont and I, a wide-eyed teenager who saw no contradiction in loving gritty punk and the wild reaches of Bush’s soaring baroque pop, had a ticket. By then she had two hit albums and was a fully-fledged star, intent on creating a theatrical spectacle with rear-screen projection, vibrant set-design, poetry, mime, magic, and 17 costume changes. Apart from Bowie, few pop singers had attempted shows with such scale and ambition, and that contributed to the crowd’s…

• In the Faber book of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy interviews, Will Oldham describes the beginnings of Superwolf as a therapeutic intervention, beckoning Matt Sweeney “back into the real world” in the aftermath of an unhappy sojourn in Billy Corgan’s ill-fated alt-rock supergroup Zwan (above). The initial plan was to write three songs together (but separately) and then perform them for the first time with minimal – or, as it turned out, no – rehearsal at a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Sweeney looks back on that experience as being “as close to the dream where you have to go on-stage unprepared as you could get, without it being an actual nightmare”.…

Peggy Seeger ★★★★ First Farewell RED GRAPE MUSIC. CD/DL Seeger’s Indian summer is growing ever warmer. SHE MAY BE 85 and the grande dame of folk song, but this doesn’t sound like farewell. Unfeasibly prolific in recent years, Seeger clearly still has much to say and, with a voice miraculously dodging the ravages of time and a close family circle of musicians working to her strengths, this is affectingly intimate. The entirely original material – a couple of songs composed with sons Neill and Calum MacColl and two with daughter-in-law Kate St John – tackles pertinent modern issues (growing old, suicide, social media, children in care and... love) without remotely sounding stern or preachy. Broadly set to piano arrangements, it references her mother’s classicism, with smatterings of concertina, accordion, organ,…

Ennio Morricone ★★★ I Due Evasi Di Sing Sing SONOR MUSIC EDITIONS. DL/LP BY 1964, Ennio Morricone had already been working as an arranger and composer for 14 years. A Rome-born child prodigy, who wrote his first compositions when he was just six years old, he had moved from pop and jazz through theatre and radio, ghosting for other name composers before working on his first official film score in 1960. In 1961 he worked on three films. By ’64 that number had risen to at least 13. The next year it would rocket to over 20. However, as any true fan of Il Maestro knows, alongside recognised masterpieces from this period such as A Fistful Of Dollars and Bertolucci’s Before The Revolution sit lesser works that were compromised by…

In 2019, Sony acquired the rights to a forthcoming documentary about Prine, while Erin Osmon’s 33⅓ entry about his astonishing debut is due this autumn. In the meantime, there may be no quicker way to fall for Prine than The Road To The Tree Of Forgiveness, a charming six-minute promotional film made by the same pair behind the documentary. Find it on YouTube. And Prine himself offers up anecdotes and candid photos in 2017’s Beyond Words, a lovingly curated anthology of his compositions.…

• Phil Spector paid an irascible Ike to leave the studio while he worked with Tina on River Deep Mountain High. • After a physical in-car row in Dallas 1976, Tina left Ike with just 36 cents and a Mobil credit card in her pocket. • Tina promoted 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It, but couldn’t bear to watch it. • Terry Britten, co-writer of the initially-rejected song What’s Love Got To Do With It, encouraged Tina to slow the pace and imagine she was jogging. A smash hit followed.…

APRIL 1966 … The Velvets play the Exploding Plastic Inevitable APRIL 1 “COME BLOW YOUR MIND,” read the advert in the previous day’s Village Voice. “The silver dream factory presents the first ERUPTING PLASTIC INEVITABLE.” Andy Warhol quickly tired of the ‘Erupting’ part. He was still smarting from his split with muse/anima Edie Sedgwick, who’d recently left his orbit for Bob Dylan. But he had to attend to his latest project, The Velvet Underground and the multimedia production he called “the biggest discotheque in the world”. He decided to let the creative universe which revolved around him explode instead. After its original venue in Queens elected to put on The Young Rascals instead, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable would debut at the Open Stage, an East Village space above Polish community…

I enjoyed the list of eminent rockers joining other bands (MOJO 329), and it got me thinking about the times Rory Gallagher, Shuggie Otis and Steve Marriott were up for membership of The Rolling Stones, and what that might have sounded like. What are the most outlandish examples of these impossible pairings? Mark McCormack, via e-mail MOJO says: The ‘what if?’ file is a curious place, where Pink Floyd asked Jeff Beck to replace Syd Barrett (“He was doing OK at the time so he turned us down,” said Rick Wright) and Brian May was unsuccessfully headhunted by Sparks (“it obviously didn’t work out,” said Russell Mael). John Lydon’s post-Pistols offer to join Can in 1978 is also a doozy: “He said, ‘I would like to sing, ’” Irmin Schmidt…

TONY JOE White didn’t meet his Nashville-area neighbour and fan Dan Auerbach until both men were nearly 10,000 miles away from Tennessee, backstage at the Byron Bay Blues Festival in Australia in 2009. For years after, the Black Keys guitarist periodically tried to pitch White about working together. Three years after the swamp rocker’s death, it finally happened. “He was a home studio guy even back in the ’70s,” explains Jody White, Tony Joe’s son and longtime manager. When his father died suddenly in 2018, his job changed, to excavating and managing a substantial legacy. The home studio was stacked with reel-to-reel tapes dating back to the late ’60s, songs not sold to another artist or right for Tony Joe’s solo albums. As Jody made his way through, he found…

Life’s Hard And Then You Die (SIREN, 1986) With themes of travel, rainy landscapes, salesmen, industrial decline and more, the band’s eclectic debut was, says Whitehead, “influenced by all kinds of world music, copied in a bad way.” The Laurie Anderson-esque Space and banjo-plucking Rope could have been hits. Song (SIREN, 1990) A year’s collaboration with classically informed Blue Nile producer Calum Malcolm, which Whitehead calls “cerebral and thick with emotion”. Its lead track was beautifully sad seaside lament New Brighton. “I prefer the word ‘melancholic’ to ‘sad’,” says Campbell. “To get out of a maudlin state, blue music helps.” House For Sale (IT’S IMMATERIAL, 2020) Sophisto-pop vignettes segue seamlessly from then to now. “After Song, we tried to get it a little bit more poppy, to rein it back…

TOR MARIES – AKA Billy Nomates – has been visiting old phone boxes on the Isle Of Wight. “They’ve got their own whole weird thing that I like,” she smiles. “The way that they beep and the way they talk to you.” An adept bedroom producer, singer and songwriter, this is no retro techno fixation: Maries was scouting locations for a video for Heels, from her latest EP, Emergency Telephone. Written at her dad’s place on the island, the new songs are full of missed connections, inspired by how a raft of communication platforms (“I must be in about 20 WhatsApp groups; Zoom, Twitter, Facebook…”) falls short in terms of nuance or real emotion. Emergency Telephone comes just months after her self-titled debut album, for Geoff Barrow’s Invada label, and…

IN APRIL 2018, WHEN GRETA VAN FLEET PLAYED LONDON’S ISLINGTON ACADEMY, the 800 people in the audience included one of their highest-profile fans, Sir Elton John. The band’s vocalist, Josh Kiszka, was backstage after the show when Elton strode into the dressing room, “like an endearing grandfather figure”, offering compliments and advice. “He told us we should flaunt what we’ve got,” says Kiszka. “I think what he was getting at was we’re young and should use it.” Elton then told the band, already renowned for their assiduous recreation of a sound more attuned to 1970 than the 21st century, that they should brush up on their rock’n’roll history. “He said, ‘I’m going to get someone to send you these documentaries about George Harrison and Joe Cocker.’” How much impact the…

May 24,1941 Robert Allen Zimmerman born in Duluth, Minnesota to (left) Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice Stone. 1944 Young Robert makes his first recording, talking and singing into a Dictaphone, aged three. 1946 Brother David is born. Aged five, Bobby sings Some Sunday Morning and Accentuate The Positive at a Mother’s Day bash in Duluth. 1947 The Zimmermans move to Hibbing in Minnesota iron ore country after father Abe contracts polio. Later, Dylan will claim the iron deposits boosted the signal of the Southern blues and country radio stations he was ensnared by. “Hibbing was a vacuum,” he would tell Robert Shelton. 1955 Having tried trumpet and saxophone, the 14-year-old settles on guitar and piano, forms The Golden Chords with LeRoy Hoikkala and Monte Edwardson. Does stints in The Shadow Blasters…

ON MARCH 20, 1970, FRIENDS AND FAMILY gathered at the Janes United Methodist Church in Philadelphia to say farewell to singer Tammi Terrell, a once-rising star at Motown Records, dead at the shocking age of 24. In the autumn of 1967, Terrell was on a hot streak of duets with that label’s vocal prince Marvin Gaye – Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Your Precious Love – when she collapsed into his arms during a concert at a Virginia college. Terrell, who suffered from paralysing headaches, was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She gamely returned to the studio after surgery, cutting more hits with Gaye, but additional operations could not save her. At the funeral, many in the congregation “wept openly,” according to a report in Jet, the African-American weekly –…

Did the template for the transition from your first album as a duo – 2005’s Superwolf – to the follow-up, Superwolves, 16 years later, come from the films Alien and Aliens? Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy: “Yes. Because we wanted to align ourselves with the horror tradition, and also because we are multiplying…” Will the next one be Superwolf 3? Matt Sweeney: “In our minds it’s already ‘Superwolfing’, which has a kind of Unhalfbricking feel to it…” BPB: “It’ll be out in 2047.” You’ve mentioned Garcia/Hunter as role models for your joint enterprise. Were there any other songwriting combinations whose example you sought to emulate? MS: “Taupin/John – we’d be happy with that.” BPB: “Or the Gershwins…” MS: “The songwriting scenes in the movie Ishtar are probably the closest description of how…

Podcasts The Guardian’s excellent Reverberate series connects music to moments of historical upheaval. In a pleasingly geeky but accessible style, presenter Chris Michael locates each episode in a different city: how a specially commissioned Shostakovich symphony helped turn around the siege of Leningrad in 1942; Egyptian rocker Ramy Essam’s song Irhal became the rallying cry that unseated the dictator Mubarak in Cairo; or Rick Astley’s key role in US black ops in Panama City. Less insightful, but ethusiastic, Tom Cridland’s Greatest Music Of All Time features loose chats about music with an array of guests. The current series features William Bell and Jason Williamson. Past guests have included David Crosby and Smokey Robinson. Equally well connected, slicker and more musicianly, drummer Joe Wong, host of the long-running Trap Set, speaks…

Laurie Anderson ★★★★ Big Science NONESUCH. LP On ravishing red vinyl, your guide Anderson’s prescient 1982 debut tunes into 2021 fears and neuroses, with an avant-soundtrack out of a lucid dream. O Superman (For Massenet) still the hands-down weirdest chart hit ever. IH Steve Cradock ★★★ Peace City West KUNDALINI. DL/LP Veteran Paul Weller guitarist spring-cleans 2011 solo album to bring added colour to ’60s-splashed folk and psych pearls like Kites Rise Up Against The Wind and hymnal Lay Down Your Weary Burden. Last Days Of The Old World adds Jamlike oomph. PG Tangled Shoelaces ★★★ Turn My Dial CHAPTER MUSIC. LP Vinyl anthology of ’80s Aussie teen band as a parallel history of Brisbane indie. Girl/boy vocals, pathos and melodies evoke The Go-Betweens but TS were eccentric, veering from…

Black Widow Sacrifice CBS, 1970 JUST AS joyful noises were made unto the Lord from the dawn of recorded sound, so Satan had walk-on parts throughout the blues age and into the rock’n'roll era. Then, at the close of the ’60s, in time for The Rolling Stones playing Sympathy For The Devil at Altamont, a more explicitly diabolic aesthetic manifested. In the US, Chicago’s Coven released their horns-throwing Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls in 1969. From Birmingham, early the following year, Black Sabbath’s mighty debut pictured Satan coming ‘round the bend and Lucifer falling in love. Another fascinating and pioneering album was released in early 1970: Sacrifice by Leicester’s Black Widow. A jazz-rock concept LP concerning the occult and demonic obsession, it was accompanied by an elaborate stage show…

WILSON WINS IT 1 Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson is victorious in the UK general election. From April 20, The Beatles begin work on Taxman (songwriter George Harrison, above, behind the PM), their critique of the government’s 95 per cent tax rate for high earners. SUPES SINGS 4 The first week of comic book musical It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman ends at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre. It closes after 129 performances, but its song You’ve Got Possibilities will be covered by Peggy Lee and Matt Monro. CRASH TRAGEDIES 12 Jan Berry of Jan & Dean is seriously injured in a car accident in Beverly Hills. On April 30, folksinger Richard Fariña dies in a motorcycle smash on Carmel Valley Road, California. DYLAN DOWN UNDER 13 Bob Dylan’s world…

Alex Winter MOST EXCELLENT, FILM-MAKER What music are you currently grooving to? I was completely immersed in Zappa world until very recently — I listened to Civilization Phaze III a lot. Also a lot of jazz, Herbie Hancock, Brian Eno, Harold Budd and the Shostakovich symphonies, which are huge and speak to the cacophonous moment we’ve had in America. And McDonald And Giles, I love that album. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? My favourite album period is John Coltrane, A Love Supreme. My favourite rock album is The Who, Live At Leeds. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Kiss Alive, from the local record shop in St. Louis. I was in the Kiss Army! I thought they…

…last month KEITH RICHARDS (right) Tweeted the words “New music on the horizon!” alongside a picture of him playing a Hofner bass … speaking to Revolt TV’s Drink Champs show, Mount Vernon rapper DMX revealed that his new album will feature Westside Gunn, Snoop Dogg and Bono. “The Bono joint is Skyscrapers,” he said. “Shit’s crazy. It got a Miami feel to it” …JOHN MELLENCAMP is making plans to finish his next album. Ten tracks were finished before Covid hit, and he’s planning 17 more… last month PAT SMEAR told Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show that, “Every once in a while me and Krist [Novoselic] and Dave [Grohl] get together and we do play as if we’re Nirvana.” Grohl, who was also present, added, “We actually recorded some stuff” …WILLIE NELSON…

DURING CREATION Records’ 17-year lifespan, Alan McGee was the biggest character in UK independent music. He discovered both The Jesus And Mary Chain and Oasis and released landmark albums by Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub and My Bloody Valentine in 1991 alone. Following Oasis’s colossal success, McGee went into rehab and worked with the Labour government on the New Deal for Musicians. Since shuttering Creation in 1999, he’s founded three independent labels and his Creation Management company. New film Creation Stories, co-written by Irvine Welsh and starring Ewen Bremner, is based on McGee’s 2013 memoir. Is Creation Stories an objective account or your own version of events? It’s Irvine’s version. I had to let go. What’s the point of getting a genius like Irvine Welsh and telling him how to write…

I was a senior in high school, and I’d gone to choral camp in Laurinburg, North Carolina. It was the first time I’d ever been exposed to musical theatre nerds, and they were obsessed with Sondheim, so I thought, Well, it must be good. I watched a video of a stage performance [of Sunday…] in college a year later and that was it, I was blown away. Some people say he’s not singable, or hummable, which is ridiculous. There are things you get right off the bat, and things you get with each successive listen, which is the mark of a deep piece of art, I think. There are so many beautiful tunes, his wordplay, the harmonies and shifts, the emotional content of the story between George and Dot, the…

1 ST. VINCENT PAY YOUR WAY IN PAIN Jaunty piano seems to herald a left-turn into Laura Nyro territory. Instead Prince and Beck tussle in the funky opener of May’s Daddy’s Home – Clark’s most engaging yet. Find it: streaming services 2 QUATERMASS III FOUND FOOTAGE Shady Mancs bring the occult sound of Eno, Joy Division, Northern soul/glam beats, Robert Calvert vox and Open University synths. Find it: SoundCloud 3 PAUL WELLER COSMIC FRINGES Not Weller’s latest hairdo, but a short, sharp, tuneful taste of his upcoming Fat Pop (Volume 1). “I’m a sleeping giant,” insists the lyric. Find it: streaming services 4 SONGHOY BLUES WORRY (LIVE) Emboldening version of Optimisme’s rallying missive (“Keep fighting today!”). Rawer, harder, even more furious fretwork. Find it: Amazon 5 ROSE CITY BAND LONELY PLACES Ripley Johnson takes a…

THE INGENUE Rickie Lee Jones ★★★★★ WARNER BROS, 1979 The new starlet in town came from the shadowy side of Hollywood, where she’d prepared for her close-up with sharp, jive-talking hipsters such as Tom Waits and Chuck E. Weiss – the latter immortalised in her debut album’s big hit single, Chuck E.’s In Love. Rickie Lee Jones took the best new artist Grammy that year for her aching, playful and gorgeously vivid walk on the jazz side of life. RICKIE GOES WEST Flying Cowboys ★★★★ GEFFEN, 1989 Hailed as a return to form, Jones’s fourth full-length long-player revived the romantic, impressionistic storytelling and jazz-flavoured pop that characterised her smash debut and its follow-up, Pirates. With Steely Dan’s Walter Becker as producer, she stretches musically and thematically, experimenting with reggae and…

CREAM Disraeli Gears (Reaction, 1967) Jake Kiszka was six when he saw Eric Clapton in a Cream documentary, and told his father, “I want to do that.” Disraeli Gears was his gateway drug, laying the foundations for Jake’s love of “guitar-centric music”. THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE Are You Experienced? (Track, 1967) “After Cream, I moved on to Hendrix,” says Jake, who found Jimi’s debut LP in their father’s record collection. The dynamism and light and shade of Purple Haze, Hey Joe and The Wind Cries Mary re-materialises in Anthem Of The Peaceful Army’s darker, deeper cuts. GEORGE HARRISON All Things Must Pass (Apple, 1970) The ‘Quiet’ Beatle’s solo work was recommended to GVF by Elton John. Harrison’s third solo LP, a triple, is a sprawling celebration of life, love, freedom…

BOB DYLAN chronicler/friend Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman had witnessed the work-in-progress that would become 1983’s Infidels album when Dylan’s de facto manager Bill Graham invited him to the studio to hear the mixed/sequenced end result. “Bob, Graham and I listened to the whole album front to back.” When it was over, Dylan asked him what he thought. Sloman was knocked out by what he’d heard, but equally as mystified by what he hadn’t: “It’s great, but where the fuck is Blind Willie McTell?” He began sputtering, incredulous. “It’s such a great song. One of your greatest songs. How can you not have put that on the album?” Dylan gently talked Ratso off the ledge. “Calm down, Ratso — it’s only an album,” said Bob softly. “I’ve made 20 of ’em.” Sloman…

TOP OF THE POPS, FEBRUARY 16, 1978. THE BBC orchestra, likely fresh from accompanying the latest singing turn on The Two Ronnies, are murdering Wuthering Heights. Alone on-stage, 19-year-old Kate Bush looks equally terrified and mortified, as she gamely tries to sing over the lumpy live rendering of her soon-to-be-Number 1 song. It was, she would later assess with characteristic bluntness, “a bloody awful performance”. Luckily for Bush, the fast-developing medium of the pre-filmed promo will become a far more natural home for her: a place to visually conjure the characters in her lyrics. In fact, two clips were made for Wuthering Heights. In the first (destined for the US market), wearing a red dress, she performed her carefully choreographed routine out on the MoD’s artillery range at Salisbury Plain.…

Matt Sweeney & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy ★★★★ Superwolves DOMINO. CD/DL/LP A SENSE OF drama seems to be one of the defining characteristics of Superwolf/Superwolves music, both in writing and performance. How and when the pre-conditions for that drama are fulfilled, and whether the phase of the moon has a place in them, only Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in his work-clothes, or on his workhorse) seem to know. But the union which coalesced so effectively between three songs played for the first time on a figurative high wire at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2003, and a Saturday night headlining set at the Green Man festival in August 2005, has reconvened 16 years later with its musical and lyrical potency miraculously intact. “When I come to your…

Various ★★★★ Edo Funk Explosion Vol. 1 ANALOG AFRICA. CD/DL/LP “YOU ARE dancing like the white man,” observes Osayomore Joseph on Africa Is My Root, the opening cut on this collection of 1980s rarities from southern Nigeria. “You are dancing like a goat … You are dancing like a fool.” If the three artists featured – Joseph, Akaba Man and Sir Victor Uwaifo – spent much of this past decade looking on enviously as their elusive contemporary William Onyeabor became a feted auteur on the electronic dance scene, they are well advised to be packed and ready when international tours recommence. Uwaifo really ought to be as big a name as King Sunny Adé already. As the leader of the Melody Maestros, he had been the recipient of Africa’s first…

FOR HALF a century, John Prine found novel ways to elucidate the small triumphs and staggering tragedies of human existence. A mail deliverer-turned-Army mechanic-turned-songwriter, Prine commiserated with the veteran mortally wounded by what he’d seen overseas while lampooning the government that made him do its dirty work. A romantic who was married three times, he captured the endorphin rush that comes with new love and the depressive wash that comes with losing it. A survivor of dual cancer diagnoses, he reckoned with the inevitably of mortality (and doubts about what comes after) while extolling the thrills of living. And then, at the start of the second verse of Boundless Love, the eighth track of what would become his final album, 2018’s The Tree Of Forgiveness, he nailed exactly what it…

• Thompson recently discovered he was a distant cousin of Syd Barrett. Their shared ancestor was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first female doctor. • At Detroit airport in 1970, the Fairports were called “goddamn hippies” and “girlies” by six men in cowboy hats who turned out to be Buck Owens And The Buckaroos. A big fan, Thompson confounded them by asking for autographs. • Disco passed Thompson by. “The whole idea of dancing to records seemed bizarre to me,” he admits. • During the Fairports’ set at 1970’s Yorkshire Folk, Blues & Jazz Festival, Dave Swarbrick urinated through a hole in the plastic sheeting at the side of the stage – directly into the press enclosure.…

ACTOR CHARLOTTE CORNWELL (below, b.1949) had already appeared in the 1974 David Essex film Stardust when she starred as Anna Wynd, one of female trio the Little Ladies, in the 1976/77 TV series Rock Follies. The fictional band released two albums produced by Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay, the first of which was a UK Number 1 in April 1976. She later enjoyed stage and screen success, including stints with the RSC. Her half-brother David was better known as the espionage novelist John Le Carré, who died in December. BASSIST MATT HARRIS (b.1969) played with SF punks Overwhelming Colorfast before pursuing a more psych-rock sound with Oranger. After their well received 2000 LP The Quiet Vibrationland, Harris was joined cult powerpoppers The Posies, playing bass on Every Kind Of Light in…

1 634–5789 (SOULSVILLE U.S.A) WILSON PICKETT (ATLANTIC) 2 GET READY THE TEMPTATIONS (GORDY) 3 BABY SCRATCH MY BACK SLIM HARPO (EXCELLO) 4 ONE MORE HEARTACHE MARVIN GAYE (TAMLA) 5 SHAKE ME, WAKE ME (WHEN IT’S OVER) FOUR TOPS (MOTOWN) 6 THIS OLD HEART OF MINE THE ISLEY BROTHERS (TAMLA) 7 LOVE MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND DEON JACKSON (CARLA) 8 SATISFACTION OTIS REDDING (VOLT) 9 AIN’T THAT A GROOVE PART 1 JAMES BROWN AND THE FAMOUS FLAMES (KING) 10 DARLING BABY THE ELGINS (V.I.P)…